September 11, 2026

Happy Friday Photon Community,

This week at Photon: Photon's App Funeral is next Thursday, September 17 in SF, gathering the best iMessage agent founders and devtool builders, iMessage Agent Contest deadline extension, the Photon community shipped a trading and marketplace iMessaging Agents, and we co-hosted the YC Demo Day pre-party with Slashy.

Announcements

The App Funeral: Photon Developer Day

Photon is hosting The App Funeral: Photon Developer Day, celebrating the end of the app era and ringing in the products coming next.

• Thursday, September 17, San Francisco, in a chapel.

• Panel featuring developers from Stripe, OpenAI, Vercel, and Tinyfish, discussing the future of agent infrastructure.

• Panel featuring the founders of major consumer startups: Ditto, Slashy, Clera, Flip Labs, and Vene Health, to discuss the future of consumer agents.

• Use Code: DEVDAYVIP for a free VIP ticket

RSVP Details

Announcements

Last Day: $3000 iMessage Agent Contest

We extended our iMessage Agent Contest, giving out $3000 to developers building Agents using Photon.

• Deadline extended: September 11, 23:59 PST

• Build on Photon → post a demo & tag @PhotonHQ → submit a Typeform

• $3,000 total prize across Most Useful, Most Creative, and Most Funny

Read Details

Build On Photon

Trading Agent: Moonpay, Paybox, & Photon

Tony (MoonPay) built a personal harness on Photon that trades and pays through PayBox, all from iMessage.

• The agent texts a weekly recap of trades and pending orders, and finishes checkout with a single "CHECKOUT" reply

• Payments route through PayBox's approval screen, so nothing is charged until an approval is sent

Watch Demo

Build On Photon

Demo Highlight: Dibs AI Agent Marketplace

Dibs: an AI marketplace that runs entirely in iMessage. Built on Photon, dibs turns a text thread into a place to buy and sell anything, with no app, no listings to scroll.

• Text dibs what you're looking for and it goes and finds a match for you out in the wild across several marketplaces

• Say "connect me w the seller" and dibs drops you both into an iMessage group chat to close the deal

Watch Demo

Community Highlights

Photon x Slashy Demo Day Pre-Party

We co-hosted a pre-party with Slashy and Driftwood at the YC founder building on September 7, the Monday before YC Demo Day.

• Y Combinator founders, builders, and alumni all in one room the night before Demo Day

• YC Perks Deal offerings for 200+ founders in attendance

That's all for this week.

We believe agents should reach everyone:
and we're building every day to make it happen.

Want to learn more about Photon?
Reply this email or grab time with us for a quick chat.

Photon is building the Twilio for AI agents - enabling agents to live inside existing messaging surfaces like iMessage, phone calls, email, WhatsApp, Instagram, Slack, and more. Our open-source kits have driven 200k+ impressions and adoption from thousands of developers.

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